Undercover Buddhas

 (Feel free to read Part 1 and Part 2 before proceeding.) It was mid-winter when Sheng-Guang finally made it back to Hu-Lao. The air was as cold and damp as he imagined Li-Dai’s heart to be. The first thing he did, though, was put out feelers about Li-Dai’s fate, and soon learned that Ying-Han had continued to work his way up the administrative hierarchy, and had recently gotten promoted from Constable of the prefect to Diplomat for the western region. He and Li-Dai had been moved to Sichuan province, where Ying-Han would have opportunities to mingle with the Turks and Uyghurs for the benefit of the empire. In short, Li-Dai was long gone. After receiving the news, Sheng-Guang made haste to Mount Song. It had begun to snow when he reached Ta-Mo’s cave two days later. The flakes were thick and lazy, and the air was full of them fluttering like infinite white butterflies, and through them he saw Ta-Mo, in his cave, seated in the lotus position, thick red robe and hood on, his red b...

Nine years after Ta-Mo began his wall-gazing, Sheng-Guang, in a crazed, desperate state, had heard rumors of a barbarian Buddhist who had “talked mad shit” to Emperor Wu of Liang, and who had spent most of the subsequent decade staring at a wall in a cave near Mount Song, talking to no one, eating and sleeping very little, and who supposedly possessed a magical gaze that could burrow imprints into rock walls. Born in Hu-Lao , only a three day walk from Mount Song , Sheng-Guang had been well-versed in Taoist and Buddhist ways of thought. He had begun his studies in his late teens after an affair with the maiden, Li-Dai had gone awry. Li-Dai and Sheng-Guang had been soulmates, or, at least that’s what Sheng-Guang had thought, and he thought Li-Dai had thought as much too. However, Li-Dai’s father had already committed her to marriage to the constable of the prefecture, Ying-Han. Ying-Han was the latest in a long line of Ying men who occupied enviable administrative positions in the Nort...

Ta-Mo didn’t quite understand his own reasons for his three year long walk to “The East.” This was before he had been recognized as the first patriarch of Chan/Zen Buddhism. This was also back in the 6th century , you see, so there wasn’t much to distract one’s self with back then, and this was particularly true for an enlightened dharma heir who didn’t actually have a self, or a real job, or a family to otherwise occupy his time with. So he headed East. And he just kept heading East. He carried nothing with him except the robe on his back, and a copy of the Lankavatara Sutra , which he had transcribed by hand as part of his intermediate Buddhist studies, and he encountered mountains and desert and bandits, and, as long as he survived whatever attempted to interrupt his passage, he continued East. The mystic poet Rumi , about 700 years after Ta-Mo died, and in Ta-Mo’s homeland, once wrote that the true mystic is lazy because she sees The Universe doing all the work, all over the pla...